The two Ghosts muscled Macy out of the refectory, up the habitat's spiral walkway, and out through the tunnel to the station, where a railcar was waiting. Four pressure suits lay on the floor at one end of its compartment, next to a long shape wrapped in a sleeping cocoon which Macy supposed was the body of Janejean Blanquet. At the other end of the compartment a floor panel had been removed and a cable snaked out of the hole to the slate resting on the lap of a woman sitting beside it. She was a Ghost too, dressed all in white like her friends, with golden eyes and long hair the colour of tarnished aluminium. As soon as Macy was shoved aboard, the woman poked at her slate, and the doors closed and the railcar accelerated out of the station into the naked moonscape.

Macy sat on one of the low cushions and the man squatted in front of her. 'We're not going to kill you. You'll get a fair trial at Paris, even though you don't deserve it. You and Loc Ifrahim.'

'Have you taken him prisoner too?'

'Some of my friends have found him. We're on our way to pick him up.'

'I guess that's why this car is heading east, away from Paris.'

The man smiled, revealing even black ridges instead of teeth. 'Don't worry. We'll get there eventually.'

'Not if my friends catch up with you first.'

'You and your friends are living fossils. You're the past from which we're rising,' the man said.

'Tell me something. Was it your idea to kidnap me, or was it Marisa Bassi's?'

'Was it your idea to kill poor Janejean, or Loc Ifrahim's?' the man shot back.

Macy met his hard stare, but didn't see any point in telling him again that she'd had nothing to do with the woman's death.

'That's what I thought,' the man said.

He stood up and wandered over to the woman with the slate, who told him, 'It will take forty minutes at full speed. It's going to be tight.'

'Make it less. Let's see how fast this thing can really go.'

The three Ghosts spread their equipment across the floor, squatting there like grasshoppers, knees up by their ears, as they checked each piece. The man saw Macy staring, aimed his pistol at her, laughed when she looked away. The Ghosts had taken her spex. No one knew where she was; she had no way of calling anyone for help. If she was going to get out of this, she would have to figure out how to do it by herself. One thing she knew, she wasn't going to get any kind of fair trial. Marisa Bassi was no doubt planning a carnival of anti-Brazilian propaganda starring herself and Loc Ifrahim. She'd tweaked his nose by siding with the peaceniks and talking publicly with Avernus, and now he was going to get his revenge.

The railcar hurtled along the elevated railway. It was one of several hundred that travelled endlessly along a superconducting magnetic track powered by geothermal bores tapping into residual heat deep in Dione's core and wrapped around the moon's equator, a great circle three and a half thousand kilometres long. Right now the railcar was running parallel to sheer slopes broken by abrupt scarps and spattered with small impact craters, one of the long ridges created by compression faulting when Dione's interior had cooled. Saturn hung low in the black sky, sinking towards the western horizon as they sped east, towards the hemisphere that permanently faced away from the gas giant.

At last the Ghosts packed up their equipment, fastened themselves into their pressure suits, and ordered Macy to climb into the spare. It was a child's suit, and a bad fit. She had brought her customised suit to the conference but it had been left behind when she'd been kidnapped.

'I won't be able to walk far in this,' Macy said, as one of the Ghosts helped her to adjust the joints.

'You won't need to walk,' the Ghost said.

The railcar glided to a halt. The Ghosts locked their helmets over their heads and the man casually pointed his pistol at Macy as one of the women checked the seals of her suit and her helmet; then the door slid open and air puffed out into black freezing vacuum. Macy stepped out of the railcar onto a narrow walkway but ignored the man's order to start climbing down the rungs set in one of the legs of the nearest of the A-frame pylons that supported the track. When he moved towards her she turned and grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him backward. They fell four metres with swooning slowness and she was able to jerk his pistol from his grasp before they hit the ground with a thump much harder than she had expected. She kicked away and pointed the pistol at the man's faceplate and told the two women, framed in the doorway of the railcar above them, that she'd shoot him if they didn't drop their weapons right away.

'I don't think you will,' the man said. He started to push to his knees, froze when Macy put a round in the ground right in front of him.

'The next one will go straight through your helmet,' she said. 'I swear.'

'That's enough,' someone else said, and half a dozen figures riding trikes appeared against the black sky above the crest of the ridge that ran parallel to the elevated railway track, all of them aiming a variety of weapons at Macy.

She looked at them, then tossed the pistol to one side. A woman laughed as the people on top of the ridge drove down the shallow slope. One of them swung off its trike, stooped over Macy, and pulled her up by her wrist.

Macy recognised the face inside the fishbowl helmet centimetres from her own. It was Sada Selene, the refusenik who had helped her escape from East of Eden.

The Ghosts carried Janejean Blanquet's body down from the railcar with solemn and reverential care, lashed it to the loadbed of one of their trikes, wheeled around, and took off and quickly left the stranded rail-car far behind. Macy rode beside Sada, bouncing along in the middle of the pack as they followed the railway east for a few kilometres before turning away and climbing a long slope that, paved with giant irregular polygons and smoothed by billions of years of infalling dust and micro-meteorite erosion, rose in a gentle grade towards a narrow gap pinched between low, rounded bluffs - the scar of an impact that had hit the top of the ridge at a glancing angle.

Macy was used to seeing moonscapes mediated by her pressure suit's AI: geographical features tagged, contours limned, deep black shadows softened by microwave radar, a fully zoomable ability that allowed her to examine distant objects in immediate close-up. But the AI in the pressure suit she'd been given had been hacked, and without its interpolations everything looked bare and bleak and nakedly hostile. She remembered one of the ancient hymns that the members of the Church of the Divine Regression had sung to praise the God who had hidden His secrets in the landscapes of pi. This one sung only at Christmas. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.

Her suit phone had been hacked, too, leaving only a single short-range channel. As they sped along, Sada told her that everything was going according to plan. When Macy asked her what the plan was, one of the other Ghosts, a man, told her that she'd see soon enough and several of the others laughed. So Macy changed the subject, asked Sada how she'd fallen in with the Ghosts. The girl explained that she'd always been a physics junkie and maths geek, that she had become interested in the Ghosts after she'd come across requests for proofs of novel assertions in special relativity they had posted on physics boards. While working on one of the assertions she had uncovered a hidden cipher that, when she'd cracked it, had yielded an encryption key that allowed her to communicate directly with Levi, the leader of the Ghosts. Finding and cracking the cipher had been an initiation test: she had passed; she had been led into deeper mysteries. Soon afterwards, she'd begun to plan her escape. She'd been too young to leave East of Eden without the permission of her parents, but when Macy had asked for her help she'd seized the chance to hitch a ride to the Saturn System.

'And I thought you helped me because we were friends,' Macy said ruefully.

'We were. We are,' Sada said. 'Although I think you made a bad mistake, Macy, when you posted that conversation with Avernus on the net. It made you look as if you were siding with the appeasers.'

'I thought it made it clear that I think that war is inevitable,' Macy said.

'It made it clear that you think we're going to lose,' someone said.

'I don't think we can defeat an overwhelmingly superior force, if that's what you mean.'

'We'll win,' Sada said cheerfully. 'We'll drive our enemies back to Earth and take charge of human destiny. You are riding with people who will never die.'

'Is that written in the stars?' Macy said, and immediately regretted it.

Silence hummed in her ears. After a moment, someone laughed.

Sada said patiently, 'It's a basic principle of general relativity that anything travelling faster than light violates causality. It follows a closed timelike curve. It's a snake that eats its own tail. Any faster-than-light machine is also a time machine, and that means that signals can be sent from some future event into its own past. So what we know about the future is as real and true as physics.'

This was at the heart of the Ghosts' creed. Levi, their reclusive leader, claimed that he received messages from his future self, who had travelled faster than light to an Earth-like planet orbiting the star beta-Hydrii, and was transmitting past-directed signals to a time before he had set out. According to Levi, the messages he received were necessarily vague, because his future self did not want to unmake his own history, erase himself by switching the universe onto a different track. But the fact that he could receive them at all was proof that in the future he and his disciples would gain access to technology that permitted faster-than-light travel, and use it to colonise the stars. They were the chosen. As long as they followed the correct path, they would complete the closed timelike curve and fulfil their destiny.

Macy thought that people who'd convinced themselves that they wouldn't ever die were likely to get themselves killed sooner rather than later, but she kept her opinions to herself. She knew from bitter experience, from being raised inside her mother's church, that there was no point arguing with Sada, that the young woman's belief system was as hermetic as the closed timelike curves at its heart. Besides, Sada had once been a good friend, even if her motivations turned out to be more than a little suspect, and Macy hoped that she could use whatever was left of that friendship to help her survive.

The little party drove through the gap at the top of the ridge into a jumbled boulderfield where chunks of ice of every size, some as big as houses, all of them capped with black dust and sculpted by micro-meteorite erosion into smooth shapes, sat on a shatterground several kilometres across and cut with forking crevasses that sloped downwards and ended at a sudden drop, the edge of a low cliff. The trikes stopped and everyone climbed off. Beyond, a lightly cratered plain stretched north and east.

Sada stood shoulder to shoulder beside Macy and pointed to a bowl-shaped crater halfway to the horizon. 'Just inside the rim, in the wedge of shadow,' she said. 'You see it?'

'No.'

'It's blazing away in infrared.'

'I can't see in infrared. Someone hacked the AI in this piece-of-shit suit.'

'Trust me, it's right there in plain sight. Just over six klicks away.'

'What's there?'

'The rolligon.'

'The one that Loc Ifrahim stole?'

'What else?'

Around them, Ghosts were busy about their trikes, unpacking equipment. What looked like rocket-propelled grenades, needle-nosed metre-long tubes painted yellow and black, with attitude jets set around their main thrusters. Fat shoulder-launchers with underslung grips and flip-up ranging sights.

Macy had a freezing sense of dismay. 'You want to kill him? What kind of justice is that?'

Several kinds of laughter rang in her ears.

'He's bait,' a man said.

'The enemy have sent a ship to rescue him,' a woman said. 'We're going to shoot it down.'

'We're going to show them who owns this sky,' another woman said.

'You're going to witness the first shot in the war,' Sada said, sounding happy and excited.

The Ghosts loaded four missiles into four shoulder-launchers, checked guidance systems, unfolded and aimed a microwave radar dish at the western quadrant of the sky. Macy stood to one side of their businesslike bustle, elbows and knees chafed by her ill-fitting suit, her right foot slowly freezing because of a glitch in the suit's thermal management system. She turned this way and that, scanning the boulderfield and the shallow slopes that rose on either side of it for possible escape routes. She was pretty sure that the Ghosts would not only fail to shoot down the rescue ship but would also make themselves a target for its counterattack. When that happened, she intended to try to put as much distance between them and herself as quickly as possible, although she was bleakly aware that she didn't stand much of a chance. She was being watched by Sada and the man with the pistol, and any attack would be over in a couple of seconds. And even if she somehow managed to get away, she had less than six hours of air - and a very long hike back to the railway . . .

It happened with almost no warning, and very quickly. A stir amongst the Ghosts, someone shouting something about a bogey at eight o'clock high, four of them stepping forward and raising shoulder-launchers in the same direction. The missiles spurted away one after the other, thrusters igniting as they sped out above the plain, stars dwindling into the black sky. Macy, following their track, spotted another star drifting high in the west, and then the entire plain lit up with a soundless flash like sheet lightning that tore the sky in half. Something was falling and on fire - it had to be the rescue ship, stricken, slanting eastward, slamming down somewhere beyond the horizon.

A white-hot plume climbed into the sky and everything around Macy instantly gained a sharp shadow. Then a shock wave raced across the plain, throwing up an expanding wall of dust. The ground heaved and Macy sat down hard as her feet flew out from beneath her. Several of the Ghosts fell down too, and all around rocks and small boulders which had stood for two or three billion years where they had last fallen were running down gentle slopes towards the edge of the cliff. There was a moment of quiet, and then the first wave of ejecta from the impact slammed down.

The rescue ship had crashed into the surface of Dione at a steep angle, smashing a new crater into the icy regolith. Most of the debris from the ship was thrown more or less straight up, but chunks of ejecta excavated by the impact flew outwards in every direction, describing long curves in vacuum and low gravity. All around Macy, flying shrapnel knocked plumes of dust and shards from boulders or struck the ground at shallow angles and spent their velocity in loosely cemented dust and ice gravel. A chunk of ice smashed into one of the trikes and sent it tumbling end over end across the boulderfield. Two of the Ghosts were killed where they stood; another took off in great loping strides and was struck down and vanished in a plume of dust.

Macy had been under fire before. Instinct kicked in: she pushed up from the ground and flung herself towards the black shadow beneath a large undercut boulder. She was almost there when Sada smashed into her and they both flew sideways, sliding down a short slope that funnelled towards one end of a crevasse. Macy used her boot-heels as brakes, ploughed to a halt in a shroud of dust, and grabbed hold of Sada's shoulder harness as she went past. She lay still for a moment, trying to get her breath. High above, fugitive stars glittered in the black sky - sunlight reflected from pieces of the ship thrown up by the impact and turning over and over as they fell back, everything large and small falling at exactly the same rate, a perfect demonstration of Galileo's famous law. An attitude motor was still on fire as it tumbled down, a chalice of burning fuel that struck a ridge, flamed out, and sent a ring of secondary debris scything outwards. Then things were falling all around, a constant random rain of brief and eerily silent explosions. Macy rolled sideways past Sada and dropped over the edge of the crevasse.

She floated down a short distance, struck a steep slope with a blow that shivered her entire body inside the pressure suit, and used the friction of her gloved fingertips to slow herself, gliding down a long way to the bottom. Screams and shouts were ripping through the short-range channel and she switched it off. In the sudden silence, she became aware of her harsh breathing, the quick surf of her pulse in her ears.

Although sunlight burned along the edges of the crevasse it was pitch black at the bottom because there was no air to refract the light, but the darkness was no hiding place because the Ghosts were equipped with infrared vision and Macy's suit was not perfectly insulated. And she knew that its small bubble of heat and air could not sustain her for ever. There was plenty of power in its batteries, but in a little over five hours she would exhaust its air supply. If she was going to escape she had to get moving, right now.

She risked blinking the suit's lamp at its lowest setting, saw a wandering floor with walls bulging out above. She walked as far as she could, groping her way in the dark to the far end of the crevasse. It was easy to scramble up it in the vestigial gravity. She clung at the lip, blinking in the wash of weak sunlight. Everything around her was as still as a black and white photograph.

As she pushed up over the lip of the crevasse someone stepped out of the deep shadow cast by a big boulder twenty metres away and aimed a crossbow at her with one hand and tapped the side of its helmet with the other.

Macy switched the radio on.

'You're coming with us,' Sada said.

'I don't suppose there's any point asking you to pretend you didn't find me.'

'Turn around and walk west,' Sada said. 'The rolligon's on the move. We have to catch up with it before people come to find out what happened here.'

'I can see that Loc Ifrahim might be useful to you, Sada, but I'm no one special. And I didn't have anything to do with your friend's death.'

'I don't suppose you did. But we've been asked to bring you back with us all the same.'

'You can save yourself a lot of trouble by telling Marisa Bassi right now that I won't help him.'

'You'll be able to tell him yourself soon enough,' Sada said.

5.

The spy had been trained to expect and to deal with every kind of trouble, from routine identity checks to hostile interrogations. But at the end of the journey that had taken him halfway around Dione, from the spot in the badlands of Padua Linea where he had landed the dropshell to the city of Paris, he simply swung down from the robot tractor on which he'd hitched a lift, loped through the glare and bustle of the freight yards to the nearest airlock. He cycled through, stripped off his pressure suit and folded it into its carry-bag, slung the carry-bag over one shoulder, and walked straight out onto a quiet industrial street.

When he phoned the social-services AI, it accepted without demur that he was Ken Shintaro, twenty-two years old, born in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto and currently on a wanderjahr that had just brought him to the Saturn System. After they achieved majority at age fifteen many young Outers spent a year or two travelling. They hitched rides between different moons by custom, every ship had to accept at least one passenger on every journey. They worked in menial jobs, sampled different cities, different cultures. Most returned home; some settled in their adopted cities; a few never settled at all, and kept travelling. As for his identity, a demon had infiltrated the Jupiter System's net several years ago and set up a tranche of false identities, waiting to be used like clothes hanging in a closet. Any person or AI with the appropriate authority could access Ken Shintaro's medical and genetic records, his commonplace educational and employment record, his unexceptional level of karma. Everyone else could check out his bio, patched together from samplings of the bios of ten thousand real Outers. A fake life authentic in every detail. The gene markers, fingerprints and iris records used for identification were his own; identical to his brothers; identical to all the ghost identities planted in the net.

Ken Shintaro was given subsistence credit, allocated a one-room apartment in an old block near the industrial zone, and offered a selection of menial jobs. He chose the first on the list - general labourer in one of the farm tubes - checked into his tiny apartment, and stripped off his funky suit-liner and took a long shower, wearing a facemask while he stood under a nozzle that shot streams of water over him, and the gridded floor sucked the water away. He'd used a shower like this on the Moon, but the water behaved differently in Dione's much lower gravity here, clinging to his skin like a thick gel.

After the shower, he shaved the face he'd been given: Ken Shintaro's face. Rounder than the faces of his brothers, the nose broader and flatter, the skin sallow, a spiky crest of blond hair. But his eyes were unchanged, and so were his teeth. He ran the tip of his tongue over that familiar terrain of peaks and steps now, and spent a little time walking up and down in his room, testing the thin hard mattress in the sleeping niche, unfolding the table and folding it back. Convincing himself of its reality, of the reality of the city that lay open to him. He had been training for this mission all his life, and now he was here, and everything was at once familiar and strange, and it was time to get to work.

He selected from an array of innocuous messages one that confirmed he had arrived in the city safely and on schedule, and mailed it to a blind account that was being monitored by the intelligence unit in the embassy in Camelot, Mimas. There was a message waiting for him, equally innocuous, a brief video of children splashing in the shallows of a swimming pond from which his spex extracted and decrypted hidden text. He had been tasked with a new secondary mission: to locate and, if possible, facilitate the extraction of two people kidnapped by agents working for Marisa Bassi and who, it was believed, were being held somewhere in or near Paris. He committed their details to memory, deleted all traces of the message.

The demon which had set up the fake IDs had also set up accounts for various small amounts of credit and kudos under various names. He used one of these to purchase the supplies he needed: common chemicals, the kind of equipment used by many Parisians to brew their own varieties of wine and beer. He established fermenters full of nutrient broth in a disused access tunnel, seeded them with ordinary yeast, and returned three days later, when the yeast cultures had thickened, and added microdots containing phage virus that had been hidden under his toenails. The phage infected and transformed the yeast cells into chemical factories. One culture metabolised urea and produced a simple but powerful plastic explosive. Two more pumped out virus particles. A fourth produced ordinary wine. He freeze-dried the two varieties of virus suspension. He used the plastic explosive to build small but effective bombs that he stashed in hiding places in various parts of the city, ready for emplacement. He bottled the wine and set the bottles on a shelf in his room, in case anyone should think to check why he had purchased brewing equipment. Then he scrupulously cleaned and sterilised the fermenters and packed them away.

All this took a week of hard work. And as Ken Shintaro, he had to work for six hours every other day in the farm tubes, too. But there was no time for rest because he had a fixed deadline: the arrival in the Saturn System of the Flower of the Forest, already on its way from Earth.

He'd downloaded several demons into the city's net the day after he'd arrived. Now they began to make themselves known. The bourse on which citizens traded goods and karma fell over several times. Traffic on the net slowed to a crawl at random intervals as demons consumed much of its processing power with vast, futile calculations. There were problems with power distribution. Temporary brownouts, and then a rolling blackout that spent most of one day migrating from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.

The city began to realise that it was under attack. The mayor appealed for calm and vigilance. Like all recent arrivals, Ken Shintaro was interviewed by a peace officer, but his cover story was armour-plated.

Ken Shintaro liked to walk around the city. He visited many apartment blocks and public buildings. He loitered in the park near the compound where Avernus and her crew lived. He saw Avernus several times, and once managed to get inside the compound by volunteering to help unload a pallet of supplies. After that, he went by the compound every day. He took long hikes outside, too. He walked through the vacuum-organism farms. He watched ships arrive and depart at the spaceport. He visited several shelters within a day's journey of the city, often staying the night before returning.

There were several cafes and bars and saunas frequented by Outers on wanderjahr, places where they could swap stories, gossip, and exchange information about jobs and free rides, but Ken Shintaro kept himself to himself. He was affable, yet somewhat remote. A quiet, studious, serious man. He worked hard at the farm, and was scrupulous about doing his share of the small maintenance tasks for which the residents of the apartment building were responsible.

This was how he first met Zi Lei, although at the time he didn't really take much notice of her. They were both members of a team of six residents who'd been given the job of changing the dust collectors in the block's central air plant, which involved putting on hooded coveralls and masks, hauling out the hoppers at the base of the plant's cyclone shaft and scooping the matted dust into bags for composting, replacing the hoppers, and then vacuuming the workspace. Afterwards, Ken Shintaro shared tea with the others, listened to them gossip for a little while, and then excused himself. Two days later he ran into Zi Lei again, at the Permanent Peace Debate.

This had started out as an ordinary public forum set up by a small group of citizens to criticise and counter the flamboyantly belligerent speeches and tactics of Paris's mayor, Marisa Bassi, and develop and promote alternatives to his policies. It had been running continuously ever since. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Anyone could take to the platform and speak until a majority of the audience decided that he or she had spoken for long enough. Approval was signalled by silence, more or less, although most of the time at least half the audience seemed to be paying no attention to the speakers, engaging instead in private conversations and arguments, distribution of donated food or self-published pamphlets (Paris had reinvented the printing press, newspapers, and books), or zoning out in some private virtual nirvana. Disapproval began with jeers and slow handclapping that spread from those who had actually been listening to the speaker to the rest of the audience, who stopped whatever it was they had been doing to express their dislike for someone to whom, until then, they had paid no attention. Embattled speakers who refused to give way were subjected to mock arrest by the debate's volunteer peace officers, dragged from the stage, and ejected from the building. Sometimes the peace officers had to do this several times in succession, when the ejected speaker ran around to another entrance and attempted to regain the stage.

Approval and disapproval seemed to be dispensed at random. Some speakers were jeered as soon as they stepped onto the stage; an old man who spoke in an invented language was given twenty minutes of reverential silence. And anyone could interrupt the speaker with a question or comment at any time, and it wasn't unusual for an interruption to last far longer than any speech.

Ken Shintaro discovered the Permanent Peace Debate while following the man who was its bete noire. He'd spotted Marisa Bassi in one of the green markets, and felt something like a coup de foudre. He knew all about the mayor of Paris from his training sessions, had watched hours of footage of his speeches and had studied a dramatised biography, but seeing him in the flesh for the first time was still a shock. He watched from a parallel aisle as the man moved through the market at the centre of an eager crowd, acknowledging jeers and cheers with the same good humour, shaking hands with stallholders, accepting every offer to taste oysters or cheeses or slices of fruit, sip little cups of coffee or juice, stopping to listen to anyone who wanted to talk to him. At last he disengaged himself from the hustle and bustle of the market and, trailing half a dozen aides, crossed a park and entered a tunnel in a high curved wall that led down to the base of an amphitheatre.

Ken Shintaro slipped in behind him. People were thinly scattered amongst dimly lit tiers of sling nets that encircled and rose up above the circular stage. A few people clapped as Marisa Bassi made his entrance, others stood up and cupped their hands to their mouths and booed, but most paid him no heed. Some were talking in small groups or studying slates, some seemed to be asleep, and the rest were watching the man who, shuffling in slow circles through the spotlights that knit across the stage, was talking in a tired, hoarse voice about lost dreams of Utopia, tears swelling in his eyes and slowly running down his cheeks, sparkling in his grey beard. His amplified voice echoed under the high roof, mixing with the aviary chatter of the audience.

Marisa Bassi was telling the people around him that he hadn't come to speak, just to listen: he liked to take the temperature of the debate every now and then. Yes, just like a doctor - why not? He had the health of the city always at the front of his mind. Someone asked him when the sabotage to the net would be fixed and he said that he had his best people working on the problem, but their enemy was very subtle.

'I know you,' someone told Ken Shintaro.

His heart jolted and he turned to see a woman standing at his elbow. She was exactly his height, fine-boned and very slender. Black hair cut straight across her forehead. As her restless gaze moved over his face, he thought of the chickens someone kept in the apartment block's communal gardens, pecking at dirt, and then he recognised the woman. She lived in the apartment block too; they had worked together on the air-plant detail; her name was Zi Lei.

He manufactured a smile and asked her about the theatre, and she began a long explanation about the Permanent Peace Debate, leaning close to him because noise was rising from the tiers of sling nets as people started to shout at the man on the stage.

'You tell me something useful!' the man shouted back. He stood with his hands on his hips, slowly turning in a circle, his face shining in the spotlit glare. 'You tell me one thing we can do that is useful! None of you know anything!'